To inaugurate it’s 12th Year Anniversary Season, William Reaves | Sarah Foltz Fine Art is pleased to present, Celebrating Houston’s Founding Modernists: Featuring David Adickes, Henri Gadbois & Leila McConnell, consisting of three solo exhibitions and a display of assorted works by their mid-century peers. As the gallery’s season opener, this exhibition offers viewers a delightful segue into yet another highly-anticipated season of art from the Lone Star state.

In 2013, Houston’s mayor issued a proclamation recognizing the importance of Houston’s Founding Artists and the impact of their contributions to the city’s vital and ever-growing visual arts scene. The following year in 2014, works by these earlier Houston painters decorated the walls of City Hall in what was an unprecedented exhibition. This exhibit acknowledged the Bayou City’s rich arts legacy and recognized local artists who have made life-time contributions to the growth of the Houston arts scene.

The Reaves | Foltz mission is dedicated to the continued promotion and exhibition of the artists who advanced the visual arts of Texas, and particularly the arts of our own city. Beginning in 2017, Reaves | Foltz plans to launch this and future exhibition seasons every August with programming dedicated specifically to honor Houston’s Founding Modernist Artists. With the official “birth date” for the City of Houston being August 30th, we thought of no better way than to annually honor these artists and celebrate their enduring legacy in the city.

Celebrating Houston’s Founding Modernists: Featuring David Adickes, Henri Gadbois & Leila McConnell, consists of three solo exhibitions, offering a tribute to these three celebrated Houston greats. The artists have been pillars of the Bayou City arts scene starting in the 1950s, and have been actively engaged in creative production for decades since.

David Adickes: In the Beginning features an exquisite selection of the early paintings that brought him his first notoriety. These early works represent the artist’s original views and formative renditions of his most favored subjects and themes. With their distinctive style and superb workmanship, Adickes’ paintings were incredibly fresh and novel when he first introduced them to Houston in the early 1950s.

Henri Gadbois:Texas Woodlands features works inspired by woodland landscapes throughout Texas that Gadbois created over the past fifty years. This grouping distinctly demonstrates his evolving aesthetic from abstraction to more representational renderings of the land throughout his career. Color, light, and pattern are all at the core of these sensitive works.

Leila McConnell:The Search focuses on her ethereal “sky paintings” and intimate collages which transcend time and place. In her distinct style, McConnell creates evocative compositions using light, color, and atmosphere along with repeated tropes, such as a sphere, bar, sun, or moon, to explore inner and outer worlds through an almost metaphysical, life-long search captured in paint.

In addition to the one-person shows above, serving as a counterpart, the gallery will also display a selection of period works by their mid-century peers, including stalwarts of Houston’s former Dubose Gallery in the 1960s: Lamar Briggs, Bill Condon, Frank Freed, Herb Mears, Kermit Oliver, Stella Sullivan, and Patricia Waldrip-Taylor.

Celebrating Houston’s Founding Modernists will be on view August 18- September 9, 2017 at William Reaves | Sarah Foltz Fine Art. The gallery will host an artist panel discussion on Saturday, August 19th from 4:30-5:30pm, followed by an opening reception from 6-8:30pm.